That was Castro's 2013 Odo Pa, to which Kinaata contributed a total of 33 seconds of rap, one verse coming at the very start and another midway through the song.
With his flawless delivery, showing no nerves at all, Kinaata caught the eye — or, more aptly, the ear — and left those hitherto unacquainted with this ridiculous talent out of Effiakuma, a suburb of the capital of Ghana's Western Region, longing for his solo efforts.
The record that saw Kinaata make his first big splash, two years later, was Susuka. That song, like nearly any other that Kinaata has since released or featured on, certainly matched the hype and exceeded all expectations — and this was a Kinaata quite different from the one Castro introduced to us just a few years prior.
He retained the slickness that characterised his rapping, but now he sang with just as much flair.
The latter was an ace we didn't even know he had up his sleeve, but Kinaata whipped it out and has played it damn well. What Kinaata does better than singing or rapping lyrics, though, is writing them, and he has just the laurels to back that up: four Songwriter of the Year gongs from the Vodafone Ghana Music Awards (VGMA).
It is, then, perhaps one of the great mysteries of contemporary Ghanaian music that the finest songwriter of our time, Kinaata, still doesn't have an album — no, not even an EP — to his name.
It's been some seven years since I first heard Kinaata promise an LP.
We were already quite familiar with his game, and, frankly, hungry for more.
And more, in the form of an album, was just what Kinaata pledged on the platform of the Delay Show, when the hostess asked if he was putting one together.
Replying in the affirmative, Kinaata added:
"My fans have intimated that they would grow indignant at me if I didn't serve them an album this year, 2016. Come what may, I'd have to meet that demand."
That was days before the release of Sweetie Pie, another of Kinaata's classics. He has since dropped even more of such earworms — crisscrossing genres for fun, from Hiplife to Highlife, Soukous to Reggae — enough to fill an album… but never really bringing himself to offer an actual album.
He does, to be fair, have his reasons.
“Albums discourage me," he said on Asempa FM in 2019.
"If people don’t get the message in my song, it turns me down. Listen to Samini’s Untamed album and you will realise we are not giving him the attention he deserves.
“The way the fans are, we will keep giving them the singles. There is no indication that the album or songs will sell online.”
Kinaata appeared to double down on that stance in an interview with NY DJ early last year.
That stance isn't exactly unpopular.
Albums aren't going out of vogue anytime soon, as they're often referred to in measuring the magnitude of an artiste's legacy. And yet an increasing number of artistes — even if still only a minority — no longer feel such bodies of work are a sine qua non. Successful music careers, they believe, could still be crafted even without albums.
Kinaata, clearly, belongs to that school of thought.
He is simply too talented and prolific for any critics to attribute the conspicuous absence of an album from his catalogue to a want of ability. It really is down to a lack of desire, but a change of heart was hinted at in the aforementioned interview with NY DJ.
"I think… people are paying attention to albums now," the 33-year-old teased, "so I intend to give you one."
Now, where have I heard that before?
By: Enn Y. Frimpong